Who owns mturk

Boehm, 40, said. Amazon claims a turking work force of half a million, but independent researchers say the number of active turkers is smaller.

The vast majority of turkers are believed to be in the United States — at least three-quarters, researchers say — with India a distant second. Mechanical Turk was created to solve an in-house problem. The name was a homage to a contraption built by a Hungarian nobleman , featuring a bearded mannequin in a turban, that dazzled Europe with its chess-playing expertise.

The moves were actually executed by a magnet-wielding human hidden beneath the board. Mechanical Turk opened to the public in with considerable fanfare. One requester I talked to has found MTurk quite effective.

For a year, Ryan Schefke, the founder of a Texas company called Lead Liaison, has used turkers to transcribe business cards that salespeople collect at events. Multiple turkers transcribe the cards to yield 99 percent accuracy, and the turnaround from the moment a customer scans a card is 10 to 12 minutes, Mr.

Schefke said. A turker is paid 3 cents per card. Many major corporations have availed themselves of Mechanical Turk. The New York Times Company has used turkers for at least three data projects. MTurk also has big fans in the social sciences. Over 50, academic studies are conducted using MTurk each year, according to Leib Litman, a founder of CloudResearch, a company that helps researchers use the platform. Turking is not always low-paying. Amber Smoot is good at turking.

When the script catches a task that pays a dollar or more, her computer blasts a snippet of operatic rock and she grabs the HIT and sets it aside until she has a bunch. She spends a lot of time on message boards that offer tips to rookies.

Most turkers are relatively young — the majority who answered the Pew survey were under 32 years old — but some are older. Jeff Archacki of Corvallis, Ore. Since , he has gotten by on disability payments for a hand injury, and turking. He sits at the computer from 2 a. The task where I rated the patriotic quotients of photographs was posted by an outfit called Vision.

I graded eight sets for Vision. At 5 cents per set, I should have made 40 cents. The current travels through two other rotors in the same way and then, finally, exits the third rotor at a position that corresponds to a different letter, say R. So in this case, the letter T has been encrypted as R. The next time the operator strikes a key, one or more of the rotors move with respect to one another, so the next letter is encrypted with an entirely different set of permutations.

In the Enigma cipher machines [below] a plugboard added a fixed scramble to the encipherment of the rotors, swapping up to 13 letter pairs. A rotor machine gets around that problem using—you guessed it—rotors. Start with a round disk that's roughly the diameter of a hockey puck, but thinner. On both sides of the disk, spaced evenly around the edge, are 26 metal contacts, each corresponding to a letter of the English alphabet.

Inside the disk are wires connecting a contact on one side of the disk to a different one on the other side. The disk is connected electrically to a typewriter-like keyboard. When a user hits a key on the keyboard, say W , electric current flows to the W position on one side of the rotor. The current goes through a wire in the rotor and comes out at another position, say L. However, after that keystroke, the rotor rotates one or more positions. So the next time the user hits the W key, the letter will be encrypted not as L but rather as some other letter.

Though more challenging than simple substitution, such a basic, one-rotor machine would be child's play for a trained cryptanalyst to solve. So rotor machines used multiple rotors. Versions of the Enigma, for example, had either three rotors or four. In operation, each rotor moved at varying intervals with respect to the others: A keystroke could move one rotor or two, or all of them.

Operators further complicated the encryption scheme by choosing from an assortment of rotors, each wired differently, to insert in their machine. Military Enigma machines also had a plugboard, which swapped specific pairs of letters both at the keyboard input and at the output lamps.

The rotor-machine era finally ended around , with the advent of electronic and software encryption, although a Soviet rotor machine called Fialka was deployed well into the s.

The HX pushed the envelope of cryptography. For starters it has a bank of nine removable rotors. The unit I acquired has a cast-aluminum base, a power supply, a motor drive, a mechanical keyboard, and a paper-tape printer designed to display both the input text and either the enciphered or deciphered text.

In encryption mode, the operator types in the plaintext, and the encrypted message is printed out on the paper tape. Each plaintext letter typed into the keyboard is scrambled according to the many permutations of the rotor bank and modificator to yield the ciphertext letter. In decryption mode, the process is reversed.

The user types in the encrypted message, and both the original and decrypted message are printed, character by character and side by side, on the paper tape. While encrypting or decrypting a message, the HX prints both the original and the encrypted message on paper tape.

The blue wheels are made of an absorbent foam that soaks up ink and applies it to the embossed print wheels. Beneath the nine rotors on the HX are nine keys that unlock each rotor to set the initial rotor position before starting a message.

That initial position is an important component of the cryptographic key. To begin encrypting a message, you select nine rotors out of 12 and set up the rotor pins that determine the stepping motion of the rotors relative to one another. Then you place the rotors in the machine in a specific order from right to left, and set each rotor in a specific starting position. Finally, you set each of the 41 modificator switches to a previously determined position.

To decrypt the message, those same rotors and settings, along with those of the modificator, must be re-created in the receiver's identical machine. All of these positions, wirings, and settings of the rotors and of the modificator are collectively known as the key.

The HX includes, in addition to the hand crank, a nickel-cadmium battery to run the rotor circuit and printer if no mains power is available. A volt DC linear power supply runs the motor and printer and charges the battery. The precision volt motor runs continuously, driving the rotors and the printer shaft through a reduction gear and a clutch.

Pressing a key on the keyboard releases a mechanical stop, so the gear drive propels the machine through a single cycle, turning the shaft, which advances the rotors and prints a character. The printer has two embossed alphabet wheels, which rotate on each keystroke and are stopped at the desired letter by four solenoids and ratchet mechanisms. Fed by output from the rotor bank and keyboard, mechanical shaft encoders sense the position of the alphabet printing wheels and stop the rotation at the required letter.

Each alphabet wheel has its own encoder. One set prints the input on the left half of the paper tape; the other prints the output on the right side of the tape. After an alphabet wheel is stopped, a cam releases a print hammer, which strikes the paper tape against the embossed letter. At the last step the motor advances the paper tape, completing the cycle, and the machine is ready for the next letter. As I began restoring the HX, I quickly realized the scope of the challenge. The plastic gears and rubber parts had deteriorated, to the point where the mechanical stress of motor-driven operation could easily destroy them.

Replacement parts don't exist, so I had to build such parts myself. After cleaning and lubricating the machine, I struck a few keys on the keyboard. I was delighted to see that all nine cipher rotors turned and the machine printed a few characters on the paper tape. But the printout was intermittently blank and distorted. I replaced the corroded nickel-cadmium battery and rewired the power transformer, then gradually applied AC power. To my amazement, the motor, rotors, and the printer worked for a few keystrokes.

But suddenly there was a crash of gnashing gears, and broken plastic bits flew out of the machine. Printing stopped altogether, and my heartbeat nearly did too. I decided to disassemble the HX into modules: The rotor bank lifted off, then the printer.

The base contains the keyboard, power supply, and controls. These snubbers had disintegrated. Also, the foam disks that ink the alphabet wheels were decomposing, and gooey bits were clogging the alphabet wheels.

I made some happy, serendipitous finds. To rebuild the broken printer parts, I needed a dense rubber tube. I discovered that a widely available neoprene vacuum hose worked perfectly. Using a drill press and a steel rod as a mandrel, I cut the hose into precise, millimeter sections.

But the space deep within the printer, where the plastic snubbers are supposed to be, was blocked by many shafts and levers, which seemed too risky to remove and replace. So I used right-angle long-nosed pliers and dental tools to maneuver the new snubbers under the mechanism.

After hours of deft surgery, I managed to install the snubbers. The HX has nine rotors and also uses a technique called reinjection. Each rotor has a set of conductors that connect each and every electrical contact on one side of the rotor with a different contact on the other side. For every rotor the pattern of these connections is unique. When the operator strikes a key on the keyboard, representing one of 26 letters, current travels through the set of nine rotors twice, once in each direction, and then through a separate set of 15 rotor contacts at least two times.

This reinjection technique greatly increases the complexity of the cipher. The ink wheels were made of an unusual porous foam. I tested many replacement materials, settling finally on a dense blue foam cylinder. Alas, it had a smooth, closed-cell surface that would not absorb ink, so I abraded the surface with rough sandpaper. After a few more such fixes, I faced just one more snafu: a bad paper-tape jam.

I had loaded a new roll of paper tape, but I did not realize that this roll had a slightly smaller core. The tape seized, tore, and jammed under the alphabet wheels, deeply buried and inaccessible. I was stymied—but then made a wonderful discovery. The HX came with thin stainless-steel strips with serrated edges designed specifically to extract jammed paper tape.

I finally cleared the jam, and the restoration was complete. One of the reasons why the HX was so fiendishly secure was a technique called reinjection, which increased its security exponentially. Rotors typically have a position for each letter of the alphabet they're designed to encrypt. Bonuses are granted at the Requester's discretion and are usually paid to Workers who do particularly good work.

We use Amazon Payments for identity verification. We also require U. Workers to provide valid taxpayer identification information when registering with Amazon Payments. To learn more, click here. Please contact your accountant or tax preparer for questions about taxes or your tax obligations.

We require Workers to provide valid taxpayer identification information in order to comply with U. The tax information interview collects the information needed to complete an IRS tax form e. We are required to collect this information before you work on HITs in the Mechanical Turk marketplace. Unfortunately, Mechanical Turk currently does not support U. If you selected "Yes" to the U.

If you selected "Yes" correctly, you may retake the tax interview if your circumstances change. As part of the registration process, you are required to complete a tax information interview form. Consenting to an electronic signature allows you to sign and submit the form to us electronically by checking the boxes, typing your name, and typing the email address you use to access your account.

No special hardware or software is required to provide your electronic signature. No, an electronic signature is not required. However, if you consent to an electronic signature, you will be able to certify, sign, and submit your form electronically by checking the boxes, typing your name, and typing the email address you use to access your account.

If you do not provide consent, you will be required to print a hard copy of your IRS tax form, sign with blue or black ink, and mail to the address below:. Please note that consenting to electronic signature allows Amazon Mechanical Turk to validate your information online, which generally enables you to have your tax information and account processed immediately.

If you do not consent to electronic signature, it can take 7 to 10 business days for your form to be processed after being received. You can access helpful content within the tax interview process by clicking on the "Tax Information Interview Guide" in the top right hand corner of the page. We are unable to provide tax advice.

For more information on the various tax forms, instructions, and descriptions of which form s may be appropriate for you, please refer to the Internal Revenue Service website www. In most cases identity verification is an automated process that typically takes a few minutes. You will receive an e-mail when the identity verification process is complete.

If your identity cannot be verified automatically you will need to submit your government ID for manual identity verification. Once you begin the identity verification process you must successfully verify your identity before you are able to work on MTurk.

If the automatic identity verification fails, you will see instructions to appeal the decision by uploading your identity documentation for a manual review. Workers who are unable to verify their identity will not be able to participate in the MTurk Marketplace.

Our team of Investigators will be working through appeals as fast as they can. You will receive an email update with the status of your appeal. If we are not able to successfully verify your identity through MTurk secure document upload, your account will be suspended.

MTurk is a subsidiary of Amazon. These Workers have consistently demonstrated a high degree of success in performing a wide range of HITs across a large number of Requesters. We leverage statistical models that analyze all Workers based on several Requester-provided and marketplace data points to make that determination.

Some of the key categories of data that are considered to be granted and maintain the Masters Qualification include the Worker's ability to consistently submit high-quality results as indicated by Requester approval rates and other related factors , marketplace tenure, and variety of work performed. Master Workers have access to work that requires a Masters Qualification.

Mechanical Turk automatically grants the Masters Qualification based on statistical models that analyze Worker performance based on several Requester-provided and marketplace data points. Those who score the highest across these key data points are granted the Masters Qualification. Workers cannot apply for this status.

To receive the Masters Qualification, try tasks across a variety of Requesters and consistently submit a lot of high quality work. Yes, the Masters Qualification can be revoked if the Worker's performance declines and he or she no longer scores highest across Requester-provided and marketplace data points, or the Worker otherwise violates our Participation Agreement.

If Workers have the Masters Qualification revoked, they will have an opportunity to improve and will be eligible to regain the Masters Qualification in the future. Requesters use Premium Qualifications to access the contributions of those Workers that are best-suited to their workloads. Please note that some Premium Qualifications are only available for Workers in certain locations.

If you want to remove any of your Premium Qualifications at any time, please contact us and we will remove you from that Premium Qualification. We will not otherwise use this information for any purpose including marketing purposes without your consent. You can contact us at any time to opt-out of Premium Qualifications and revoke your consent for us to use the profile information you provided. To learn more about our information practices, please read our Privacy Notice. Where does the name Mechanical Turk come from?

What is a HIT?